Does US democracy deserve low grades?

By Gene Miller
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Published: December 3, 2017

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Part 1 of 2

Fifty years ago, most Americans, if asked to rate the world’s best democracies, would without hesitation have placed their own at the top of the list. And they might well have been right. But what if the same question were asked today?

Evaluating the quality of global governments has become fashionable in the early 21st century, possibly in part because more countries have adopted democratic forms. Several respected organizations have developed tools for this purpose. These include Polity IV, Global Democracy Ranking, Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit. (See their websites for more information about them.) All use broadly similar criteria such as political rights, civil liberties, press freedom, gender political equality, and income equality/inequality. Their conclusions, perhaps not surprisingly, run along parallel lines. What is surprising, and troubling, is what they say about the United States.

Let’s examine two of these indexes. Freedom House has been assessing governments for about 45 years, stressing mainly the categories of civil liberties and political rights. Currently, it rates 195 governments as either “free,” “partly free” or “not free.” The U.S. has always been considered “free” — and still is, along with nearly 45 percent of the other regimes evaluated.

However, Freedom House also compiles an “aggregate” ranking which compares countries on the basis of these two categories, and here American democracy doesn’t fare as well. What it calls “setbacks” in political rights and/or civil liberties occurred in 2016 in at least 12 “free” countries, including the United States. Moreover, America’s aggregate score is lower than that of most other advanced democracies, including Sweden, Canada and Great Britain.

Even though it’s still regarded as a full democracy, the U.S. doesn’t make the top 20 among the world’s “free” states. Given that we are the oldest continuously functioning democracy on the planet, this judgment is both ironic and alarming.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a division of the prestigious British publication The Economist, has been preparing a comparable, though more detailed, Democracy Index since 2006. It relies on five criteria: the nature of the electoral process and the degree of pluralism present, how well a government functions, the extent of popular political participation, a country’s political culture (its fundamental political ideals and values) and civil liberties. Once complete, the EIU analysis ranks each country as a “full democracy,” a “flawed democracy,” a “hybrid” (or mixed) regime or an “authoritarian regime” (essentially a dictatorship).

Until last year, the EIU, like Freedom House, always considered the U.S. a “full democracy.” But in 2016, for the first time, we were demoted to the status of a “flawed democracy.”

Why? And what does this mean? To say that something is “flawed” is not an ultimate “good or bad,” “up or down” judgment. It just means that it’s imperfect — it doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to according to its own standards and in the estimation of others.

Thus the United States’ “flawed democracy” is still democratic: for example, it conducts free and fair elections as it’s always done, and it continues to respect basic political liberties. But in other ways — particularly citizens’ trust in their government and their willingness to participate actively in the political process — the U.S., in the view of the EIU, comes up short.

Many Americans might be inclined to be skeptical of what “elitist” organizations (as some would call them) say about our political system. On the other hand, opinion polls suggest that a large majority of us, regardless of political ideology, are fundamentally dissatisfied with how our government operates — or doesn’t.

And how does the EIU rank the United States in comparison with other countries? Again like Freedom House, not especially well. Overall, it’s tied with Italy for 21st among the world’s democracies, just behind Japan. But it’s rated substantially lower than most “full democracies” including all four Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland), Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and Spain. We even lag behind such traditionally less industrial nations as Malta and Uruguay.

But that’s not the whole story. Following the EIU’s five evaluative criteria mentioned above, the U.S. is tied for 36th, 28th, 21st, 20th and 44th, respectively. Many of those countries are, like the United States, classified as “flawed democracies.”

Why is American democracy given such relatively low marks? And to the extent that they accurately characterize American democracy, what can be done to get us back on track? We’ll examine these questions next.

GENE MILLER taught history at Penn State Hazleton from 1969 to 2004 and still resides in the area.

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